Re: Violence — Fight or Flight

Skyler’s Blog of today, On Violence, called for feedback (so somebody did ask!) This brought to mind the book I am currently reading, The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles, and Their Secret World War, by Stephen Kinzer. This book describes violence on a massive scale. The Dulles brothers were assassins of the most egregious sort. Most humans will restrict their violence to that caused by their instincts toward fight or flight, essentially the built-in bias toward self-protection. But the kinds of violence perpetrated by statist egomaniacs is an entirely different thing. What is the difference? Premeditation, because fights or flights for self-defense are rarely anything other than spontaneous, rarely planned and connived for. Self-serving, because planned violence is usually agenda-serving. The agenda for the Dulles brothers seemed insanely obsessive. The Dulles brothers rank up there with Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney, and George Bush 43 for nationalistic public figures who sought violence through outright war or clandestine overthrow to pursue abstract goals. This is an order of violence beyond escaping from unease.